My first widescreen LCD - few questions

[Gaidal]

Hey guys,

Based on the buyer's guide, I am now the proud owner of a new ViewSonic vx2025WM. Wow is this thing nice! It replaced an old Viewsonic CRT that was quite a dinosaur. It wouldn't display any resolution correctly BUT 800x600.

So based on that information, I'm having quite a bit of trouble adjusting to 1600x1050. I love the extra real estate, but my aging eyes are having a little trouble reading file names, and the windows taskbar is about 1/8 of an inch.

Am I just going to "get used to it" or are their tricks of the trade people use to make these things scale a little better? I tried just changing the font size in windows, but that looks like crap so maybe someone has a better suggestion?

 

[Peter]

You need to tell Windows that your monitor is roughly 96 dpi (this is the default setting anyway), and from there you can then choose font size "big" and check "big icons".

Crap looking fonts are solved by using a DVI connection and enabling ClearType font smoothing.

 

[eggothewaffle]

I thought the native resolution for 16:10 displays is 1680 x 1050?

 

[TheRyuu]

Originally posted by: eggothewaffle
I thought the native resolution for 16:10 displays is 1680 x 1050?

It is.

 

[Peter]

... if they're 20"

 

[Gaidal]

Yeah sorry, typo on the 1600 thing, it should be 1680.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll give these things a shot. Forgot all about that damn ClearType thing.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

wish me luck, ordered mine from ZZF last fri, about to be shipped. hope i dont get any dead pixels or dvi problems =(

 

[BernardP]

Originally posted by: Gaidal
I'm having quite a bit of trouble adjusting to 1600x1050. I love the extra real estate, but my aging eyes are having a little trouble reading file names, and the windows taskbar is about 1/8 of an inch.

You will probably find that with all the tweaks possible in XP and IE (or other browser), 1680x1050 will still leave too many things too small. Vista is supposed to take care of all this of course :disgust:.

Your best bet might be to try 1280x800 with ClearType. There is no obligation to use the native resolution, although of course it is the best as no scaling is involved.

 

[kmmatney]

That's the trouble with 20" LCDs, they have a very small pixel size (0.255 mm). I have some bad eyes, and also have a 20" LCD with mall pixels. However when need to do a lot of work on the computer, I'll use another 19" LCD I have with larger 0.297 mm pixels. The difference may not seem like much, but the larger pixels make everything much easier to see.

You can also try other resolutions, such as:

1280 x 800
1440 x 900

Here is an interesting 20" LCD with larger pizel sizes.

20" LCD 1400 x 1050 0.292 mm pixels (non wide screen)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824116008

 

[Peter]

1400x1050 4:3 20" is beginning to ship. We're seeing two or three offerings now here in Europe.

As long as your OS of choice can't scale everything, this may be a good idea for people with impaired vision.

Linux/KDE on the other hand is really good at scaling things - and with a higher resolution display, stuff the same physical size looks much better because it consists of more pixels. In particular, text fonts look much smoother. .29mm pixel size looks like Lego to me. YMMV.